Monthly Archives: October 2014

Every three years, the arts charity, Creative Foundation holds a public art festival called the Folkestone Triennial. The event is held in Folkestone; which is a seaside town on the south-east coast of England. The theme of the project is that artists are invited to use the town as their ‘canvas’. Sounds like fun, I don’t imagine there are many places bold enough to let artists loose in their public spaces.

One of the installations that caught my attention is a collaboration between a 3D printer manufacturer Renishaw and an outdoor art group called Strange Cargo. The creative and fun result of their joint effort is the installation of a luck and wish recycling point. Their piece incorporates various lucky symbols: horse shoes, wishbones, 4 leaf clovers, shooting stars, etc. The concept is that visitors insert a penny, make a wish and then take a different penny to spread the good luck.

They decided to title the piece ‘The Luckiest Place on Earth’. I’m very impressed that they printed the piece in titanium.

What caught my eye is that their costs seem extremely high; not that there is any pricing info on their web site (never a good sign). According to the news item, printing a phone case would cost ~$60. I’ll pass, thanks.

I think they are making a fundamental mistake if they are going to base their prices depending on the complexity of the object. One of the coolest things about 3D printing is, once the model design is complete, complexity should have no bearing on the cost of printing an object. The quantity and type of material you need, to print the object, should be the determining cost factor.

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I’m not a huge fan of the online version of Esquire magazine. However, I saw an item about Eric Clapton and just had to click through.

It was a quick little read. Not sure it was all that insightful but I did like his comment on a quote he thinks might have been from Quincy Jones:

I don’t put something on tape until I’ve played around with it for a couple of weeks. I heard someone else say this — it may have been Quincy Jones. That he gets an idea, but he doesn’t really act on it unless it keeps coming back and starts to annoy him.

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Imagine if 3D scanners were as common as a cell phone camera (or for that matter cameras and scanners integrated together). For beginners, 3D modeling would seem to be easier to become involved with if you had 3D renderings to start your projects with. Well, if your tablet or cell phone had a 3D scanner embedded you might be more inclined to start modeling the world around you.

Intel has been working on adding 3D scanning capabilities to portable devices with a technology they call RealSense:

“The idea is you go out, you see something you like and you just capture it,” Krzanich explained. He said consumer tablets with built in 3D scanners will hit the market in the third or fourth quarter of 2015, with Intel also working on putting the 3D scanning cameras on drones.

As a gentleman mentions in the comments, no word yet on the resolution. Still, this seems like a very important development. Making 3D scanning more common place can only feed grow in the 3D printing industry.

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Quotes can be insightful, inspirational, motivational and fun. Thought I’d point you to a little set of quotes on creativity I found on Mashable. They seem to have thought it would be fun to display them as cross stitch panels, can’t say I disagree.

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I bumped into this little item about using friction welding, to fill in those holes that you sometimes get in your 3D prints.

The premise is based on the fact that plastic has a relatively low melting temperature, a temperature easily obtainable with friction. If you can rub the plastic against an object fast enough, the friction will cause enough heat for that plastic to melt. This melted plastic (3D printer filament in this case) can then be used to fill in holes, gaps, and other blemishes on a 3D printed object.

Welding two plastics together seems fairly straight forward. I think using this process would be a bit tricker to fill small holes, since the object has the same melting point as the material you are filling with.

On the artistic side of things this technique offers the potential to add additional color and designs to complete your printed object. Makes me wonder if something like a wood burning tool, at the correct temperature, couldn’t be used to a similar end.

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Not sure there is much demand to use carbon fiber in the art space. It caught my eye, that MarkForged is releasing a new 3D printer called the Mark One that can print with carbon fiber.

Sounds like they are marketing this printer as a solution that uses carbon fiber 3D printing to replicate existing parts created from different materials. If strength is a factor in the piece you want to produce, carbon fiber might be an interesting alternative to metal.

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Lost in all the reporting about the Scottish independence vote was this important event, the unveiling of the statue by David Annan for Hamish McHamish; local St. Andrews celebrity. Over the years Hamish’s fame has been growing about town, he now has his own facebook page and a book about him. However, I can’t help but suspect that the desire to immortalise Hamish may have had an undercurrent of competitive spirit with Edinburgh and their statue to a mythical dog.

Here’s a nice photo collage of the unveiling; I like how Hamish even has his own logo:

They managed to get a shot of Hamish inspecting the statue:

I thought I’d round out the post with a nice artistic shot of Hamish in his environment: